Tansey Contemporary

About

Internationally-renowned glass artist Clare Belfrage lives and works in Adelaide, South Australia. She has maintained a vibrant practice as an active member of both Adelaide and Canberra, Australia’s artistic communities as a founding member of Blue Pony glass studio, former Creative Director of Canberra Glassworks, and studio member at JamFactory, Australia’s longest-running hot glass studio. She graduated from Monash University in Melbourne with a BFA.

She is known for her intricately detailed sculptures that meld organic, blown-glass forms with highly detailed, complex, and elegant line work. Belfrage creates her textured hot-worked pieces by laying long, thin threads of glass known as stringers, three to six at a time, across the hand-blown surface in a repetitive pattern until it is fully covered. The effect creates a woven surface texture that mimics netting, webbing, and basketry. Her cold-worked pieces begin with hand-blown forms and the addition of thin, glass rods melted onto the surface, a technique known as cane drawing. Belfrage then develops the surface of these pieces through a cold-working process that does not rely on heat. Methods include grinding, carving, engraving, polishing, and sandblasting, among other techniques. Belfrage’s work, as Dr. Robert Bell, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at the Australian National Gallery says, exudes “a sense of effortlessness despite the extraordinary technical complexity in its creation.”

Belfrage pulls her inspiration from nature as well as textiles, specifically their rhythms, patterns, and details. Her observations of rock formations, plant forms, seashells, and sand as well as the textures of natural fibers and baskets inform her glass drawing. “My point of view,” Belfrage says, “is often looking from close up. The big feeling that small gives me is intimate and powerful. The industry in nature, its rhythm and energy, dramatic and delicate, still holds my fascination as does the language and process of glass.”

Belfrage’s work has been recognized for its innovation and originality. A two-time winner of the Tom Malone Glass Prize, Belfrage most recently received the 2016 FUSE Glass Prize. In 2018 Belfrage earned the South Australian Living Artist (SALA) designation, which recognizes the work of leading practitioners from the region who have significant national and international profiles along with considerable influence in their chosen field. Her work is represented in major public collections such as New York’s Corning Museum of Glass, Portugal's Museu de Vidro, Marinha Grande, Washington State’s Tacoma Museum of Glass, and several museums in Australia including the National Art Glass Collection and the Australian National Gallery.

Cheryl Ann Thomas was born in Santa Monica, California and graduated from the Art Center College of Design with a BFA. Before practicing art full time in the late 1990s as a ceramic sculptor, Thomas worked as a grade school teacher. She lives and works in Ventura, California.

Thomas creates her elegant, intricate works using the age-old coiling technique. Unlike other sculptors who integrate the coils to create a smooth surface, Thomas retains the integrity of each thin, serpentine coil and the imprint of her hand, giving the works their textured surfaces. She creates tall cylinders of thin, coiled porcelain that when fired collapse and fold in on themselves. Chance and unpredictability dictate the process. “I pinch the coils together but don’t use anything to really make them stick. The coils interact with each other in the kiln and fold or break. They’re perfectly symmetrical when I put them in,” Thomas says. Sometimes she combines these accidental forms to create a new piece for a second or multiple firings. Her practice is inquiry based in that she begins with a question, much like a scientist would begin with a hypothesis, and then experiments in the studio. This intuitive, organic approach to making imitates processes in the natural world. “The fact that it’s built up coil by coil,” Thomas says, “that’s the way a lot of things in nature grow.” Her works gain their subtle hues through oxides like manganese, black iron, and cobalt - “the same things that color stones,” Thomas says.

The textures of her sculptures not only echo textiles, frayed or splitting at the seams, but also natural elements like dried corn husks or peeled tree bark. Their slumped shapes call to mind both abandonment and repositories. Thomas says that her works, which she calls relics or artifacts, “are the remains of human intervention. These sculptures form a permanent record of my interaction with the material.” She says she “invites the physics of failure during the firing.” The works in both their form and content remain open ended and continuous. Drawn to silence, sensuality, chance, and loss, she developed a process that enfolds these elements into a distinct experience of creation and destruction.

Thomas has exhibited her work in solo and group shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe. Numerous collecting institutions hold her work in their permanent collections such as the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Fuller Craft Museum, among others. Her work was recently featured in Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay at the Craft and Folk Museum which highlighted ceramicists for their experimental manipulations of clay to expand the technical, aesthetic, and metaphoric potential of the medium.

Biography : Shimomoto arranges glass into sculptural tapestries examining the aesthetic possibilities in fusing methods and concepts from the mediums of glass and fiber. Shimomoto studied glass as a special student at Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH. After 2 years she moved to Wisconsin for graduate school and received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin.
She received her BFA from Musashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan. Harue has worked as a teaching assistant and interpreter at Pilchuck School of Glass, as well as the director of large scale projects for artist Toots Zynsky, and flame working assistant to Brent K Young. She has received many awards and distinctions for her glass work.